4,119 research outputs found
Learning distributional token representations from visual features
In this study, we compare token representations constructed from visual features
(i.e., pixels) with standard lookup-based
embeddings. Our goal is to gain insight
about the challenges of encoding a text
representation from low-level features,
e.g. from characters or pixels. We focus on Chinese, which—as a logographic
language—has properties that make a representation via visual features challenging
and interesting. To train and evaluate different models for the token representation,
we chose the task of character-based neural machine translation (NMT) from Chinese to English. We found that a token
representation computed only from visual
features can achieve competitive results to
lookup embeddings. However, we also
show different strengths and weaknesses
in the models’ performance in a part-of-
speech tagging task and also a semantic
similarity task. In summary, we show that
it is possible to achieve a
text representation
only from pixels. We hope that this
is a useful stepping stone for future studies that exclusively rely on visual input, or
aim at exploiting visual features of written language
Mental Structures
An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or “sentential,” “analog” or “digital,” and so on. Here, I examine the grounds for making much more specific claims about how mental states are structured from constituent parts. For example, the state I am in when I perceive the shape of a mountain ridge may have as constituent parts my representations of the shapes of each peak and saddle of the ridge. More specific structural claims of this sort are a guide to how mental states fall within broader representational kinds. Moreover, these claims have significant implications of their own about semantic, functional, and epistemic features of our mental lives. But what are the conditions on a mental state's having one type of constituent structure rather than another? Drawing on explanatory strategies in vision science, I argue that, other things being equal, the constituent structure of a mental state determines what I call its distributional properties—namely, how mental states of that type can, cannot, or must co‐occur with other mental states in a given system. Distributional properties depend critically on and are informative about the underlying structures of mental states, they abstract in important ways from aspects of how mental states are processed, and they can yield significant insights into the variegation of psychological capacities
Improving Distributed Representations of Tweets - Present and Future
Unsupervised representation learning for tweets is an important research
field which helps in solving several business applications such as sentiment
analysis, hashtag prediction, paraphrase detection and microblog ranking. A
good tweet representation learning model must handle the idiosyncratic nature
of tweets which poses several challenges such as short length, informal words,
unusual grammar and misspellings. However, there is a lack of prior work which
surveys the representation learning models with a focus on tweets. In this
work, we organize the models based on its objective function which aids the
understanding of the literature. We also provide interesting future directions,
which we believe are fruitful in advancing this field by building high-quality
tweet representation learning models.Comment: To be presented in Student Research Workshop (SRW) at ACL 201
Improving Distributed Representations of Tweets - Present and Future
Unsupervised representation learning for tweets is an important research
field which helps in solving several business applications such as sentiment
analysis, hashtag prediction, paraphrase detection and microblog ranking. A
good tweet representation learning model must handle the idiosyncratic nature
of tweets which poses several challenges such as short length, informal words,
unusual grammar and misspellings. However, there is a lack of prior work which
surveys the representation learning models with a focus on tweets. In this
work, we organize the models based on its objective function which aids the
understanding of the literature. We also provide interesting future directions,
which we believe are fruitful in advancing this field by building high-quality
tweet representation learning models.Comment: To be presented in Student Research Workshop (SRW) at ACL 201
Combining Language and Vision with a Multimodal Skip-gram Model
We extend the SKIP-GRAM model of Mikolov et al. (2013a) by taking visual
information into account. Like SKIP-GRAM, our multimodal models (MMSKIP-GRAM)
build vector-based word representations by learning to predict linguistic
contexts in text corpora. However, for a restricted set of words, the models
are also exposed to visual representations of the objects they denote
(extracted from natural images), and must predict linguistic and visual
features jointly. The MMSKIP-GRAM models achieve good performance on a variety
of semantic benchmarks. Moreover, since they propagate visual information to
all words, we use them to improve image labeling and retrieval in the zero-shot
setup, where the test concepts are never seen during model training. Finally,
the MMSKIP-GRAM models discover intriguing visual properties of abstract words,
paving the way to realistic implementations of embodied theories of meaning.Comment: accepted at NAACL 2015, camera ready version, 11 page
Political Text Scaling Meets Computational Semantics
During the last fifteen years, automatic text scaling has become one of the
key tools of the Text as Data community in political science. Prominent text
scaling algorithms, however, rely on the assumption that latent positions can
be captured just by leveraging the information about word frequencies in
documents under study. We challenge this traditional view and present a new,
semantically aware text scaling algorithm, SemScale, which combines recent
developments in the area of computational linguistics with unsupervised
graph-based clustering. We conduct an extensive quantitative analysis over a
collection of speeches from the European Parliament in five different languages
and from two different legislative terms, and show that a scaling approach
relying on semantic document representations is often better at capturing known
underlying political dimensions than the established frequency-based (i.e.,
symbolic) scaling method. We further validate our findings through a series of
experiments focused on text preprocessing and feature selection, document
representation, scaling of party manifestos, and a supervised extension of our
algorithm. To catalyze further research on this new branch of text scaling
methods, we release a Python implementation of SemScale with all included data
sets and evaluation procedures.Comment: Updated version - accepted for Transactions on Data Science (TDS
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